I think that my concern is that I fell into a simple trap. Now I know
it's there I probably won't do it again - but I want to report it so
that others don't do the same thing.
The problem is that intuitively "make install" should install a working
program or bring an existing one up-to-date. Clearly, in FPC, that is
not true and it installs a program suitable for testing with a separate
action needed to make it the live version. Ideally, there should be a
separate "make testinstall" for a test system and with "make install"
having its usual semantic. However, it seems to late to change that.
A message emitted at the end of "make install" along the lines of "now
enter make -C compiler installsymlink" would have probably stopped me
falling into the trap and I think that would be a good thing to add to
always remind the user about the extra step to make the compiler the
live version.
However, it may also be worth adding a warning message to the fpc binary
to warn when the selected symlink points to a binary with a different
version number to fpc. That could also be useful diagnosing broken or
partly updated installations.
Tony
On 29/01/16 15:26, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
I wonder whether a useful compromise would be to install a sufficient
symlink that fpc -V reaches a plausible binary. After all, I'm sure
I'm not the only person who has a symlink layer like ppcx86-3.0.0
and having ppcx86 forcibly overwritten before I was ready for it
might not be what I wanted.
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